Erik's blog Discussing open source innovation, personal fabrication and a new and better world

Since 2018 I’ve been less involved with Ultimaker, the company I ran with my co-founders. While I really miss the amazing people there and the vibrant atmosphere, Ultimaker has “grown up” to a point...

I frequently listen to the AllThings3D podcast during my commute, I really recommend it (Link). If you want to learn about relevant developments in 3D printing, it’s a great source and digest. Tonight I...

We were lucky to be featured in Tegenlicht. Tegenlicht are exceptional documentary makers who go in depth into major issues of humanity. The part where I’m being interviewed starts at around 34 minutes. Most...

I’m really excited that our company has just started offering fully assembled Ultimakers in addition to the kits!! The Ultimaker: the Fast, high-detail 3D printer! Don’t worry, we won’t drop the kits from our...

At Codebits, an amazing event organized by Sapo (an awesome, innovative Portugese company) a lot of nice stuff was happening. Besides a 48 hour programming contest, there was a hardware hacking den. This is...

Last week was the 3D printing event in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. Ultimaker exhibited there together with about 20 other Ultimakers, shown by their proud operators (see this Ultimaker blog post). There were also RepRaps,...

Bernhard, an Ultimaker power-user at MetaLab Vienna, has gotten the Sprinter firmware working on an Ultimaker. Sprinter is written by Kliment and Caru, based on Triffid Hunter’s codebase, based on FiveD [update]oops, it’s based...

Peter Hanna of Ars Technica wrote an article on copyright implications once 3D printing becomes more common. Surprisingly, when opening the article I saw a picture of myself (I had nothing to do with...

In the RepRap community, you can observe several interesting applications of domestic manufacturing. A manufacturer will probably not make their product compatible with competing products. But what if you still want this? How cool...

The slides of our joint talk are now available. First up are Rhys Jones and Adrian Bowyer, the third section is my part: RepRap @ FAB6 International Conference, Amsterdam View more presentations from Erik...

Today was our talk on RepRap at the FAB6 conference in Amsterdam at the Royal Academy of the Arts and Sciences. Rhys Jones introduced RepRap and showed his latest developments in multiple materials. Adrian...

Our wedding day was really unforgettably beautiful: Below is my original post about “the making of the cake topper”. It stood there perfectly because my best friends made a gorgeous cake (such a great...

In March 2010 I gave a talk at the MIT Sloan School of Management on RepRap and the democratization of Fabrication Technology and emergence of open hardware communities, entrepreneurial spin-offs, etc. Bre Pettis and...

What I really like about the Thingiverse physical object repository is that people are not just adding awesome, innovative [1, 2] and useful [1, 2] new content. They also innovate in how they publish...

Together with Siert Wijnia from FabLab Protospace I gave a workshop and presentation at SHiFT 2010 in Lisbon, Portugal. The topic was Personal Fabrication while highlighting the roles of FabLabs and the RepRap project...

I finally finished splitting and uploading the video’s, so here it is in a Youtube playlist as well: Source: video.fosdem.org A full page interview on RepRap in the NRC, a dutch quality newspaper! Some...

RepRap got coverage in a well respected Dutch newspaper, NRC.next. They also made a blog post with an interview, the original post is in Dutch, but here’s a (poor) google Translation to English. The...

Even things that are peripheral to the RepRap and makerbot are going through some remarkable evolution! It not that strange, because they can really make life a lot easier. Some accessories, like spindle holders,...

Nick Jones from Gartner made an interesting remark: “[A]s one of my clients pointed out yesterday, do we really want an affordable domestic fabber? Fabbers will likely â€œprintâ€ objects using some form of plastic....

In the previous post, I described the rationale for adding a support material capability. It’s not needed for every object, but to have consistent results with tight tolerances, for many objects you cannot do...

I was honoured to be asked to speak at the Corporate Entrepreneurship and Open Innovation. Speakers included Henry Chesbrough (!), an authority on open innovation, so needless to say I was challenged to give...

Courtesy: Blackbag.nl BoingBoing blogged about reproducing keys from distant photographs. This made me think back off what we were doing at Hacking At Random ’09 with our RepRaps. Ray had created an STL model...

I’ve designed a little part that allows you to connect the extrusion drive mechanism, which pushes the plastics, to the extruder which it is pushed through. Here you can see a printed version, attached...

I was honoured to present RepRap with Adrian Bowyer, who is the one who came up with the idea of creating a self-replicating machine that would ‘live’ in symbiosis with humans. Presenting our RepRaps...

I’ve created a gcode processor in php. [Edit] This is now documented here: http://objects.reprap.org/wiki/3D-to-5D-Gcode.php[/edit] It allows you to rewrite 3D Gcode from tools like Skeinforge and use them with the 5D firmware. I’ve added...

The exact topic is still preliminary, but my masters research is going to be on user innovation in fabrication and its interrelation with the commercial players, their products and their customers. The creation of...

The driving mechanism that pushes the thermoplasts or metals through the heater chamber (for making them liquid) is a very critical one. It needs to push the plastic with a strong and reliable grip....

There’s a reason why this video spreads like pig flu… Highly contagious. Not just harmful things can spread exponentially, also the beautiful things in life! (P.s. the HD version is highly recommended if it...

Debugging sucks… I’m (re)building my machine, and one thing I’m missing is transparency. We’re adding layers to keep complexity manageable, but inevitably some transparency is getting lost along the way. There are several interfaces...

When researching the distributed user-centered innovation process, I came across this lecture by Eric von Hippel (see below). Also, in my presentations I’ve quoted Eric von Hippel a couple of times. He researches how...

There is considerable talk about a revolution that awaits us in personal fabrication. A lot of the news reaches me, but mostly not the mainstream media, YET. Fabrication tools (Fabbers) such as the RepRap...

Nederlandse versie: zie onderaan At FabLab Utrecht, a.k.a. Protospace several RepRaps are going to be built (five to start with). I’m supporting the group with advise (and of course encouragement 🙂 ). It will...